motoguy128 wrote:
chaparral wrote:
Normally my powerbalance has consistently been 51/49 R/L on my rides, like for the past 6 months or so. This weekend I had two good rides that saw an improvement in my numbers, but my balance on both of the rides were 53/47. These rides saw a big improvement in my best 1 hour power and also much higher average power for ~3 hour rides on the same route as a few weeks ago. If I was using a stages, the average power that I would have seen would have been maybe 3 watts higher instead 12 watt average I measured. So with a stages I could have gotten the impression that all of my hard training did not result in that big of an improvement, which is bad for motiviation and possibly worse I could change my training (training that was clearly working, but stages could give the impression that it was not working well).
In other words, a single ride , especially just looking at averages, is not a very good test. Seriously, my balance was pretty consistent over months, but then changed. On a stages how would I know that?
Very true. That's a legitimate risk. Ignorance is bliss on a Stages. However, there's also greater potential for calibration errors and temperature variation error on other power meters I believe. So you can't say with certainty that it was in fact a 12 watt improvement either. I've zeroed mine 4 or 5 times since installing it and have yet to see a significant change in the calibration value... and it of course auto compensates for temperature. Though I'm not sure how much that influences power if the outdoor temp goes up lets say 15F during a ride.
The quarq for both of those rides is very stable. The manual zero value before one of the rides was 40 and at the end of the ride was 39 (This was a bike going from inside at ~68 degrees to outside at something in the 50s, so temperature does not affect things much). I also auto zeroed about 15 minutes into the ride and maybe one other time. So yes there is uncertainty on the 12 watt value, but even for that, I do not see how a drift would affect the balance value.
Stages does appear to measure the left side power accurately, compensates temperature very well, and is very immune to installation errors. I just think that measuring only the left side is a huge drawback. If they could also instrument the right crank arm, they would have a great product.
Why have you only zeroed 4 or 5 times since you have installed your stages?
